What Alabama Says About America, and Christianity

December 6, 2017

Alabama makes us uncomfortable, because it’s an accurate mirror of what lurks nationwide.

Let’s thank Trump, Roy Moore and the GOP: They have proven forever that white American evangelicals are not a religious group at all but a cult dedicated to demagoguery, scapegoating, and the demonizing of fellow citizens, zealotry, suspicion and tribalism. And with delusions about religion in America exploded also goes delusions about our nation’s exceptional “calling.”

Thank Trump for proving that far from being exceptionally good, let alone “God-chosen” we are exceptionally stupid.

In 2016 Trump won and cut out America’s entertained-to-death “brain.” With the 2017 Trump/GOP tax bill smashing the middle class and poor to enrich the rich, Trump cut out America’s heart.

Our delusion of goodness is gone.

Go figure: At a time of planetary stress on God’s Creation it’s Trump’s evangelicals who lead Trump’s fervent promotion of a fossil-fuel America, coal mining, pipelines, and fracking and the rejection of the very idea of climate change let alone stewardship.

How can I describe the Trumped evangelical movement my family were leaders in? This way: Christians are in the grip of self-delusion of the kind that compromises the conscience and allows for an unstoppable descent deeper and deeper into the abyss of lost faith in goodness, virtue, beauty and kindness, yes and lost faith in Jesus.
Elections used to be about politics and policy. With Trump in the White House we are now in a war for the soul of America. In 2018 our job isn’t to “win” an election but to – quite literally – decide if we even want a country at all.

One other thing: It really is time to “Put Christ back in Christmas.” Whomever you think Jesus was – Son of God, prophet or deluded crazy person – he did not teach pedophilia, woman abuse, and theft from the poor to give to the rich.

We need a Reformation of religion, a revival of beauty, truth and goodness- and a Christianity that follows Jesus not Ayn Rand.

2 Responses to “What Alabama Says About America, and Christianity”

‘Virtue signalling’ in conservatives is all about how tough they are, how they don’t bleed, how they don’t feel pain as others do. So their herd-mentality is to try to out-tough the other guy, and Trump is exhibit A. Whether its the environment, immigrant children, moving an embassy to Jerusalem, promoting a child-molester for the Senate, or twitter-trashing some individual American before the public, is all for show: “Look at me! Look at how heartless I can be! Ain’t I a true conservative!” And somewhere, the ‘true conservatives’ are gleefully snickering at everybody else’s ‘gnashing of teeth’, even when its their backyard that’s getting the Ax.